Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (22 page)

I helped her with the script she was writing, at a table below that photo of Marlon by the rainy window, and learned about the lives of prostitutes and street people. She called me her secretary, and I felt needed.

At the end of the school year, some friends and I decided to make a funny tape about our class, using snatches of songs. Most of my contributions were a bit obscure for high-school girls in 1979—Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin, songs I knew from the compilation tapes called “Jack’s 20s thru 70s” that played constantly at his house. Then, after we finalized our script, I realized that my eight-track tape of Stevie Wonder’s
Songs in the Key of Lif
e was useless for our purposes. The store wouldn’t exchange it because it was a discount version. I convinced Aunt Dorothy to take me to Tower Records, where I knelt down and secretly, I thought, swapped my discount tape for a full-price one.

The only difference was a strip of yellow on the label, instead of a strip of white. I told myself that it wasn’t really shoplifting, because I was exchanging like for like, not stealing anything. The album was the same; who would even look for that strip of color? I planned to come back another day and officially exchange the full-price eight-track for the LP.

As I walked out to the parking lot, where Aunt Dorothy was waiting for me, a security guard took my wrist and said, “You’ll have to come with me.”

I got off with a lecture. It was humiliating, but the worst of it was being caught shoplifting—which, really, I knew it was—with a monogrammed Rolls-Royce as my getaway car. I looked like a little rich girl. It was true to some degree, I knew, but still I felt a gulf between appearance and reality. I wore the same three dresses in rotation; my shoes were hand-me-downs from Anjelica and Cici; my allowance was barely enough to cover basic toiletries. I didn’t
have enough money to buy one album so as not to disappoint my friends. I felt poor, even barren. I almost wished I really was, so that my inside would match my outside—and I knew what a hypocrite I was.

I was terrified that Aunt Dorothy would tell Dad—or Helena. She didn’t. I decided she must think it would reflect badly on her, since I’d never done anything like that before. Dad might ask why I’d felt I had to steal, and then she’d have to admit how little of the child support he paid her actually got spent on me. I was a bad lawbreaker: consumed with guilt, nervous of being caught, glancing about shiftily before fumbling my exchange, sauntering so nonchalantly to the door that it must have been obvious I’d done something wrong. As much as anything else, my total incompetence convinced me not to try anything like that again.

“You need only to look around you, to see the wonder, to know that a higher Being must have created it,” said Sister Charles, who had made me her pet. With her Irish accent, cropped gray hair, and sensible skirts, she reminded me of Nurse. But she was larger and sturdier, and she had an ownership of her place in the world, whereas Nurse was blown about by the gusts of the Huston family drama. God was her invisible ballast.

I envied her that unshakable stability, and her golden vision of the world, so perfect and intricate and orderly. That wasn’t what I saw. I saw randomness, indifference, cruelty, and pain. There was no benevolent hand directing it.

In Ireland I’d had to memorize the catechism word for word: no “of” where a “to” should be, no “a” for “the.” Southern California Catholicism didn’t require that kind of precision, but we did go to chapel every Friday, and the familiar ritual was comforting. It threw a line back to my earlier self, my earlier life, and strung the fragments together. Belief in God seemed warm, a sanctuary. It
would assign me a place in creation that was uniquely and perfectly mine.

The year before, I had written out a prayer that I would meet John Travolta, and he would fall in love with me. Even though it had lots of “Please, God”s in it, I felt that it was incomplete, so I finished it off with the entire “Our Father,” even including the last line, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory,” which nobody in Ireland had ever used. I’d heard it on a TV commercial, intoned by a majestic-looking Indian gazing into the sky. I was afraid that leaving it out might be God’s excuse for not granting my prayer, while putting it in, even if it didn’t really belong, surely couldn’t offend Him because it was so complimentary.

After a few days the one prayer seemed paltry. So I wrote out another, this time in red pen to show how strongly I felt, and all in careful capitals in case God couldn’t read my regular handwriting. I knew it was ridiculous even as I was writing it, but still it felt good. I was doing something to try to take control of my life.

I folded the papers into little squares. The thought jumped into my head that if God had trouble reading anything other than capital letters, He might have trouble reading inside the folds—but what could I do? I wanted to keep the prayers on me at all times; I didn’t want Aunt Dorothy, or anyone else, reading them. As I didn’t wear a bra yet, I slotted them into my underwear—which meant that I had to wear underwear to bed too. The paper became cottony with the oils from my skin.

After a few months, I was keeping them just for form’s sake. There was no sign of John Travolta, so obviously God—if He existed—wasn’t interested, and I was losing interest myself in someone who could make a movie as ridiculous as
Grease
. Maybe it was the thinning of my crush that made me careless.

In London, I borrowed Jack and Anjelica’s bathroom when they were out, since mine didn’t have a tub. Drowsy from reading in a cloud of stephanotis bath oil, I heard the front door open and
leaped out, grabbed my bathrobe, and ran upstairs. Only when I was putting my clothes on ten minutes later did I realize that I’d left the prayers on the edge of the washbasin. I tiptoed downstairs, hoping Anjel wouldn’t confront me. I thought she’d take a dim view of the whole thing, and tell me I was an idiot—which I knew I was. The bedroom door was closed. I sidled into the bathroom, which was right beside it, and there were the prayers, where I’d left them. Unfolded. Read.

I picked them up and ran back upstairs. I refolded them on their fragile creases and slipped them back against my skin. But they didn’t sit right anymore. They seemed to itch, as if the fingers that had touched them had left a toxic residue. After a few days, I buried them deep in the kitchen garbage. I’d been exposed for having a crush on a dumb guy, but what stung the most was that Anjel would think me credulous for writing prayers to a God who didn’t exist.

As I sat in chapel at school, still not believing but once again wishing I did, I wondered whether I should ask for Confirmation. A number of girls were preparing for it, and the smooth, tracklike progression of their days appealed to me. I had never made my first Communion, though I’d seen Jackie and Caroline Lynch in their bridelike first Communion dresses, and I wasn’t at all sure that I’d ever been baptized. Probably not, I figured, since I was the product of an illicit love affair. My lack of real belief relieved me of any spiritual qualms about taking Confirmation when I had never been cleansed of original sin; the problem was that I wasn’t sure if the nuns knew what an atheistic upbringing I’d had, or if I’d have to produce certificates of some kind. I certainly couldn’t ask Sister Charles, since then I’d have to tell her that the man who she still thought had made her favorite film wasn’t really my father.

I decided not to say anything about Confirmation. If I wouldn’t be taking it as a sacrament, why would I be taking it? There was no point in taking a sacrament based on a lie.

At least I could pray, properly this time. Whether God existed or not, there was no harm in praying. But what to pray for? A mother, a proper father, a normal family life? They were too far beyond what I knew—if I suddenly had those things, I wouldn’t be me anymore. So I prayed for belief, and prayed as if I believed, putting full passion into the silent words in my head.

I didn’t feel them rising to heaven. They just echoed in the cavern of my skull.

A
t Cholmondeley Castle, during our two days of gentle collision for Tony’s wedding, Dad had drawn pictures of the place he was building in Mexico. It was outside the town of Puerto Vallarta, beyond the reach of the coast road, which turned inland to avoid the mountains. Foreigners weren’t allowed to buy coastal property in Mexico then, so he’d bought a ten-year lease from the local Indian community. His face glowed as he described how the buildings were designed to melt back into the jungle. It disturbed me that he was, so bluntly, planning for his death—and so soon. When he described the buildings disappearing into the jungle, I saw his body merging into the earth.

I went to Las Caletas—“the little coves”—for the first time the Easter after I came back from London. I was longing to see it, this Swiss Family Robinson enclave that Dad had built. I
wasn’t living with Cici, so I wasn’t so torn between her and Dad as I used to be; and as the years went by, Maricela was becoming as irrelevant to me as I was to her. I wanted to spend time with Dad, to reestablish the relationship we’d had. I wanted to prove to him that John Julius’s appearance in my life made no difference to my love for him.

At Puerto Vallarta airport I was met by a woman named Joan Blake, who described herself as Gladys’s secretary. Gladys was living at Las Caletas with Dad. There was no telephone service there, so Joan was the anchor in town, with a CB radio for communication. We drove on a narrow two-lane road through fields and into town, which was just as I remembered it: a grid of cobblestone streets with tendrils climbing up the hillside. We carried on out the other side, toward the beaches where Cici and her gang had loved to go, past Mismaloya where Dad’s set for
The Night of the Iguana
stood deserted and crumbling into the jungle, just as he’d designed his new home to do. Finally we came to a little fishing village called Boca de Tomatlán.

There was a makeshift café on the beach: a few tables and a refrigerator of soft drinks. Open boats—
pangas
—slid slowly up and down the swells, anchored to buoys, motors slung up at their sterns. A few men pulled in nets, with fish flapping inside the twine. I heard Joan asking for Armando or Javier. Their names were like an incantation, the boatmen who could carry me to Dad’s new kingdom beyond the waves.

I think it was Javier that day. A
panga
drew up at the little wooden jetty, and I got in. There were a few boards across it for seats, and fishing nets lay in the V-shaped keel. It was a weathered, creamy white. I could see the linenlike weave of the fiberglass through the syrupy paint.

Joan waved as Javier revved the motor and we headed out of the cove. Pelicans perched on the rocks and dived after fish. Low, dark green trees, tangled with vines, furred the steep hillsides all the way
down to the rocky shoreline. I gripped the plank to stop from bouncing as the
panga
bumped across the corrugated water.

The salty air was thick, rich with the smells of damp greenery and fish. As I breathed it in, I felt I was drinking it, slaking a thirst for the expansive wonder of the world. Here was space and freedom. A sour-sweet whiff of gasoline spiced it as Javier gunned the motor into the open bay.

We passed a finger-shaped cove, tiny and deep, with a scrap of beach gleaming white in the sunlight like a buffed fingernail. I longed to take a picnic there one day. The coastline was almost uninhabited: one house at the long beach called Las Animas, “the spirits”; the village of Quimixto, thatched huts clinging to the hillside and a big brick house on an outcrop into the water. For half an hour the boat bumped on, the motor droning, the wind warm in my face, a double spray of white feathering at the bow.

I knew we’d reached Las Caletas when Javier pointed the boat toward shore. There was one perfect, secluded little beach, with a thatched house set in a cleft of hillside; then a small point of rocks; then another beach, shallower and longer, with a patch of flattish ground beyond, planted with flowering bushes and traced with brick pathways. I almost couldn’t see the houses. Their red-tiled roofs were already mottled with lichen, and they had no walls, just screens that shimmered phantomlike amid the lush tangle of greenery.

Anchored about twenty yards offshore was a blue
panga
. As Javier gunned the motor to run us up on the beach I saw the name painted on the side of its bow:
Allegrita
.

Dad appeared from among the bushes, wearing a pajama-like outfit of thick white cotton that stopped above his ankles. He looked brown and healthy: not strong, but hale. His step was light, as if the warm brick of the path shot energy up into his bare feet. He stepped down onto the sand to hug me. Instantly I loved this new incarnation of him. This was where he belonged: still king of his domain, but a small and cozy domain, with nobody to impress, luxurious with fruit
and flowers instead of valuable artworks and hot and cold running servants, and edged by the protected water of the bay.

“Welcome to Las Caletas, honey,” he said, his arm around my shoulders. “I’m glad you’ve come.”

Danny had been there during construction; Tony and Anjelica had never seen it. It warmed me to be the first of Dad’s children to come and stay in his new home.

I slept in Gladys’s house, since the guesthouse on top of the hill wasn’t finished yet. Though the houses were close together, you couldn’t quite see one from another. There were big sheets of sailcloth on runners under the wide eaves to draw closed at night, and terra-cotta fireplaces for warmth. We could find one another or disappear, as we liked.

As well as the two beds in Gladys’s L-shaped room, there was a crib. She had just adopted a little girl: Marisol.

Marisol was less than two; Gladys was over sixty. The story I was told—I can’t remember who told it, but not Gladys—was that a friend of Gladys’s had wanted to adopt a baby, and Gladys had gone in search of one for her. She’d ended up at the Puerto Vallarta brothel, where Marisol was pulled out from underneath a bed. Her mother was happy to give her up, especially to a promising future in America. Then the friend in New York said no: this little girl was too old. Gladys couldn’t leave her at the brothel, so she kept her.

Gladys adored her. She was a round little thing, always laughing. For the week that I was there, she hardly ever cried. She loved it when I bounced her on my lap and tickled her. I’d never played with a toddler before, and I fell in love with her too. She could barely talk, so it didn’t matter that my Spanish was broken. I was surprised that Gladys had called her by a name so like Maricela’s, since I knew that she disliked Maricela; but I never asked her why. Perhaps it was the name her mother had given her, and Gladys hadn’t wanted to change it.

Dad swam in the mornings, and we played backgammon, and
he sketched me while we talked. His gaze felt like a caress, sweeping softly over my face, and his pencil was an honest recorder. He didn’t want a pose; just me.

Talk was easy here: about books mostly, and the doings of Las Caletas. I didn’t feel interrogated, as I always had in the Beverly Hills Hotel; I was here for a week, not one of those crammed afternoons which were too long and too short at the same time. Our words were shot through with sunlight and airy with the breeze that came off the salt water and through the screens and the fat, shiny hibiscus leaves outside. Often he’d play with some new pet: a boa constrictor called Lechugita, an ocelot, a ring-tailed
tejon
. In the background was the constant crackle of the CB radio, turned down low until we heard Joan’s voice saying, “Joan to Las Caletas. Joan to Las Caletas. Come in, Las Caletas.” There was a generator to power a walk-in fridge—unlike the other houses along the coast, which had no electricity—but no phone, no newspapers, no television. The CB was our only connection to the outside world.

We had one strange, trivial disagreement, when Dad told me how a local worker had let him down with the excuse that his mule was pregnant. He shook his head in condescending amusement at how the man could be so stupid as to think anyone would believe such an excuse.

“Maybe it’s in the translation, Dad,” I said. “He probably said
burro
. It’s a donkey. It could be pregnant.”

“No, honey. He said, his mule. And everyone knows mules are sterile.”

Dad didn’t speak Spanish. I knew he had no idea what the man had actually said. Nor did I, but I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Dad wasn’t. I realized that he’d clutched on to this idea of the thick-witted, colorful locals, and he wouldn’t let it go. He always insisted he loved Mexico and loved Ireland; but he loved the Mexicans and the Irish like children. When, at school in L.A., I wanted to take Spanish for my foreign language because it would
be more useful, he insisted I take French because, he said, it was the language of culture and civilization.

(He didn’t really speak French either. Anjel has memories of following him, cringing with embarrassment, through hotels as he cast “bone-jure”s right and left, like a king scattering coins to the populace.)

As we talked and played, we’d hear a
panga,
which was the signal that Archie, a jolly Hawaiian chef, had arrived from Quimixto. An hour or so later Archie rang a bell and we all came together for lunch, the only meal we shared: Gladys, Dad and I, and usually an ex-CIA agent named Bill Reed, who lived down the coast at Las Animas and was helping Dad write his autobiography. Maricela didn’t join us. She was Dad’s personal attendant; she had no interest in anyone else. She tolerated other people only because he wanted us there.

I felt closer to Dad at Las Caletas than I ever had. I loved this idyllic place that he had created as much as he did. I felt loved too: he had named the
panga
after me.

I was fifteen, and finishing eleventh grade. I’d taken all the twelfth-grade classes Marymount had, English more than once. Sister Colette agreed there was no point in my going back for the final year of high school. I wouldn’t graduate with the seniors, which was fine by me; I didn’t care about things like that. I got my high school diploma by mail.

I took the exams I needed for college entrance, and applied to a few in a halfhearted way, because it was the thing to do. I didn’t want to go to college aged sixteen—I knew I wasn’t ready for that social world. I didn’t know what I did want to do, though. I could carry on living at Gloom Castle—and it would be easier with a driver’s license, which I could get in August, when I turned sixteen—but it wasn’t an appealing prospect.

Dad was about to leave for Budapest, to film
Escape to Victory
with Sylvester Stallone (I could never hear his name without thinking of Marlon’s practical joke), Michael Caine, and Pelé. The story was based on a real incident, in which the Nazis had organized a soccer match between some prisoners of war and their guards, but the script was pretty silly. Dad was doing it for the lark. In Ireland, he’d always watched the World Cup, and Pelé had been the star of four of them. Dad wasn’t impressed by many people, but he was impressed by Pelé.

He arranged for me to work on the film as a production assistant. I was excited, and nervous. I’d come to rely on Helena for moral support, a sort of lodestone for what was right in the world. Dad wouldn’t give me that; he’d judge me, and find me wanting if I was wanting. He liked people to be sure of themselves, and not just good at what they did but the best. How could I be that, right off the bat, doing something entirely new?

Maricela, obviously, would be no comfort. I was trying hard to be her friend, but I couldn’t read her. Sometimes she seemed to accept me, even like me; other times I thought she hated me, or just wished I didn’t exist. She told Dad that I stole things from Las Caletas, when all I’d done was borrow a facecloth to wrap my special acne soap in. Gladys would be in Budapest too—without Marisol, who had to take second place to Dad—but her quiet reserve was ironclad. She wasn’t someone to turn to if things went wrong.

My ticket arrived from the travel agency. I’d be flying alone. As the date closed in, I started to panic. I couldn’t back out; Dad would despise me for a coward. Something, some accident, would have to save me from going. I wished for one of those earthquakes or car crashes that teenagers wish for, the kind that only harm other people but throw everything into disarray.

If I break something, I thought, I won’t have to go. I wasn’t brave enough to throw myself down the stairs or jump from a great height—which I’d have to lie about anyway, and I knew I was a bad liar. Maybe, I thought, I could break my finger. I laid the pinkie of my left hand on the bookshelf, and brought a rock of turquoise down on
it, which a friend of Dad’s in Mexico had given me for Christmas. It hurt—but the skin was barely red, and the bone wasn’t even close to breaking. I smashed the turquoise on it again, harder, and harder again. I could feel the muscles of my right arm seizing up, trying not to hurt my finger even as I tried to break it.

This is ridiculous, I thought, staring at my sacrificial finger. There’s no way I’ll ever be able to break it. And if I do, what am I going to tell Dad? That I’ve broken the little finger of my left hand and that means I can’t come? Even a broken arm wouldn’t do. It would have to be a broken leg. Which would mean I couldn’t roller-skate either, so I’d be marooned even more gloomily in Gloom Castle. And if I can’t break my finger, what chance on earth would I have of breaking my leg anyway?

So I got on the plane.

My room at the Budapest Hilton connected to Dad’s suite, but mostly I kept the door closed. He was tired and went to bed early after a day on set; we ordered room-service dinners independently. He didn’t keep tabs on me, or set any rules. I was responsible for myself—in effect, living on my own.

Grown-up though I was from hanging out at the skating rink, I hadn’t had a boyfriend, hadn’t even had a date. I had an impossible crush on Teihotu Brando, who lived in Tahiti and spoke only French; when he visited his father and came down to Helena’s house, all I could do was gaze at him. My French still didn’t go much further than the songs I used to sing with Sister Annunciata.